We arrived back at our hotel and spent some time wandering around the beach and pool area. I took advantage of the darkness to play with this new camera and see what I could accomplish. Keep in mind that I am a "picture-taker," and by no means a "photographer." So everything I'm doing here is a complete guess based on the limited and fragmented knowledge I have. I took the photo above using a 10 second exposure with no flash. The hardest part of this was keeping the camera still for 10 seconds. But the result was surprising to me.

I played with the setting some more and discovered that I could reduce the exposure time with the right amount of available light. The photo above was taken using a 5 second exposure with no flash.

We headed into the pool area to stick our feet in the hot tub. The best part of this was that I was able to use the cement to keep the camera still. The photo above was taken using a 2 second exposure. The camera set the ISO at 1000.

Taking that same photo again with the exposure set at 1 second caused the camera to up the ISO to 2000. My understanding is that a lower ISO is preferable. But this photo turned out quite well.

For the photo above, I set the exposure to 0.1 seconds. With such a short exposure time, the camera upped the ISO to 6400 to allow the sensor to take in more light. Even though the additional "noise" produced by the higher ISO is visible, the photo is actually pretty good.

The photo above was taken with the same settings as the previous photo, (0.1 seconds, ISO 6400). The difference between this photo and the previous photo is that the camera bumped the aperture f/4 to f/4.5.

My limited understanding of this is that a higher aperture allows less light to reach the sensor, which results in a darker photo. Aperture also seems to be affected by the amount of zoom applied, (i.e. less zoom = lower f-number = brighter picture). I added some zoom, which resulted in a higher f-number and a darker picture.

The photo above is another shot at 0.1 seconds and 6400 ISO. As long as I can keep the camera still, the pics turn out pretty clear.

The photo above uses the same settings as the previous pics. However, adding some zoom to try and focus on the pool causes the aperture to jump from f/4 to f/5.6.

The photo above was taken with no zoom, a 0.05 second exposure, ISO 5000, and f/4.5.

Adding some zoom increased the aperture to f/5, lessening the amount of light reaching the sensor. To compensate, the camera set the ISO to 6400. The picture is still pretty decent. But a good bit of noise from the higher ISO is visible.

The short exposure of 0.05 seconds caused the camera to bump the ISO to 6400. An aperture of f/4.5 resulted in a dark picture, but still decent overall.

Raising the exposure time to 0.5 seconds allowed the camera to take in more light. ISO moved to 2000, and the aperture went to f/5. The result was a bright picture of decent quality.

I took a series of shots playing with the exposure time to see what would happen. I used a 0.5 second exposure for the photo above which caused the camera to bump the ISO to 5000. The photo is good, but slightly noisy.

This photo was shot with a longer 0.8 second exposure which caused the ISO to drop to 4000.

I used a 1 second exposure for the final shot which dropped the ISO to 1600. The result was a pretty decent night shot. I'll get the hang of this picture-taking thing someday !